I was 17

17 years old in 1969 when my brother asked me if I'd like to join him on a three day hike up in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park.

He had just come home from Vietnam, even though I had camped out many times with my family,

I had never been on a height for that long before, so I said

yes. The first day we followed a steep path that dropped a thousand feet to the river.

It was about the end of April, which is early spring in the high country, and Yosemite is a big

place.

We didn't see anyone else throughout the entire trip as we traveled over hill and

Dale in the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains and the first night we camped

near a babbling stream.

After lunch the next day we walked through a sunny alpine meadow covered in light green knee-high spring grasses and flowers. The meadow was situated in a valley surrounded by tall wooded hills, and it was a spectacular

sight, and then we entered an Aspen forest dappled with sunlight.

There we noticed the faint smell of a skunk.

It was weak enough that we figured the skunk must have left some time ago, so we kept on walking.

Further into the grove, we came across a newly built windowless ranger shed constructed of thick

corrugated steel.

All the necessary tools and equipment to repair trails in the back country were kept there,

so the forest strangers wouldn't have to haul them back and forth. We knew this because the front

and one side were torn off with the heavy metal corrugated panels scattered all

over the nearby woods. We stood there gawking at it for several minutes trying to figure out how this could have happened.

My brother said it must have been a big bear, freshly awake from its winter hibernation that did it.

But on closer inspection, there were neither claw marks nor teeth marks on any of the

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